and slid back at will. “You gotta keep walking,” she said. “You don’t walk, and it won’t work.”
I turned, and kept on walking. Never argue with the surreal; there’s no winning against irrationality. The image of Vera slid off the wall behind me and onto the wall by my side. She was walking with me. I could only see her profile, like an ancient Egyptian painting turned sideways in a Pharaoh’s tomb, and her outline was wobbling, uneven, as if the invisible cartoonist sketching her onto the concrete couldn’t keep up with the speed of her swagger. I said, “This is peculiar.”
“You think?!” she chuckled. “Jesus.”
As we neared the top of the ramp, her whole form was gently eaten away by the lack of concrete on which to project itself, until there was nothing more than a pair of knees, a pair of ankles, a pair of feet walking beside me, before even that was erased by the lack of wall onto which to walk. Then there were just a pair of painted footprints walking next to mine, that landed with an audible splat splat splat as they stepped along beside me, drawn in white paint. As we passed by a lamp-post she was briefly back again, her image keeping track of her footsteps, painting itself onto the nearest handy surface: postbox, telephone box, as we walked on.
Not having a mouth didn’t stop her talking. Her voice drifted out of the air, somewhere above those painted steps on the floor.
“So, how’s it going, Swift?”
“Not too well,” I answered, watching the street around me for someone with a straitjacket and a literal mind. “I’ve wound up Midnight Mayor, been chased, pursued and misunderstood, and now I’m talking to, with all respect, a dead pair of painted footsteps.”
“Yeah. That must be a bit freaky.”
“It could be worse.”
“Seriously?”
“Someone says ‘inauguration’ in my line of work, and you can just bet there’ll be freaky shit. It’s like quests. You get told ‘go forth and seek the travelcard of destiny’ and you know, I mean, you seriously know that it won’t have just been left down the back of the sofa. You read - seen - Lord of the Rings?”
“Yessss . . .”
“Ever wondered why they didn’t just get the damn eagles to go drop the One Ring into the volcano, since they seemed so damn nifty at getting into Mordor anyway?”
“Nooo . . .”
“See? Fucking quests! So talking to a dead pair of footprints. Fine.”
We passed a parked white van, and for a moment Vera was back, her painted form shimmering across its glass and metal sides. She looked worried.
“Something bad is going down, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yup.”
“Seriously bad?”
“Pretty much.”
“I know. I guess what you said about the whole quest thing - it makes sense that I should know, yeah?”
“I guess so. Any useful tips?”
She’d vanished off the side of the van. For a while there was nothing but the splat splat splat of her footsteps, as the only sign she still walked by me. Then, “End of the line.”
“Thanks.”
“Swift?”
“Yeah?”
“You heard of the death of cities?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he’s real? That he’s been real ever since Remus turned to Romulus and said, ‘hey, cool digs, bro’?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he can be summoned? Sometimes he’s called by the volcano, or the thunder, or the war, but always, something summons him.”
“Yeah. I’d heard.”
“Swift?”
Her voice was fading, the painted footsteps on the ground growing fainter.
“Yeah?”
“Am I really dead?”
“You got shot and turned into a puddle of paint.”
“That’s not normal corpselike behaviour.”
“No. It did occur to me that it was a little unusual. You are - were - leader of the Whites, a clan with a big thing for life, paint, graffiti and all the magics in between. But then again, if you’re not dead, what are you doing here?”
“Good bloody point.”
Her footsteps faded to a thin splatter, then a little smear, then died altogether. We didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to the vibe.
Just above Aldgate, I turned west, heading towards Old Street and Clerkenwell Road, watching offices dissolve slowly into a mixture of shops and flats, piled up on top of each other, joining briefly the ring road that was at all hours laden with traffic, and then heading further along, skimming the northern edge of the Barbican to where those painted statues of those mad-eyed dragons holding the shield with the twin crosses stood guard over the city. The white towers of the churches built after the Great Fire were mainly behind me, twenty-six in